The School of Making Thinking offers year round classes designed to bring rigorous thinking into conversation with experimental pedagogies.
HOLY FOOLS
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INSTRUCTORAlexandra Tatarsky has been called “a hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” by Theatre Jones and “an East Village relic” by Vogue. She experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and often performs as a mound of dirt. Her one-man-shows Beast of Festive Skin and SIGN FELT! premiered at La Mama ETC and have toured nationwide. She was a member of X-ID Rep at the New Museum, a theater ensemble devoted to investigating the ethics of intercultural cross-play, and has continued to explore the construction of selves and communities in real time with original performances at Bronx Art Space, Queens Museum, Basilica Hudson, Gotham Comedy Club, U.S. Blues, The Brick Theater, Vox Populi, Metro Pictures Gallery, and many other small, dark venues. With a B.A. in Russian from Reed College and 2-year Lecoq clown training at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance, her current research focuses on the intersection of Russian zaum poetry and French mime pedagogy as entries to the irrational. She is a professor at the School of Authentic Journalism and has led workshops around the country on mimodynamic translation, political performance, ensemble devising, and solo creation. Alexandra Tatarsky is a 2016 Movement Research artist-in-residence.
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HOLY FOOLS"Holy Fools: Performing the Irrational Imaginary" is a performance workshop interwoven with performances! Hysterical laughter politics to reenergize you in these dismal times! Surreal psycho babble songs and conversations!
Together we will make and share performances and writings from the perspective of the clown, the holy fool, the outsider, the bumbling truth-seeker. Through readings and embodied experiments, we will take inspiration from myriad traditions and practices that engage gibberish and ecstatic movement including Russian Futurist zaum poetry, Kabbalistic vision text, primitive voice work, automatic writing, and Nuyorican lingulisualism. Drawing upon Lecoq clown pedagogy, commedia dell’arte, and contemporary dance practice, we will undertake physical explorations that access rage, despair, hunger, excitement, longing, and curiosity – and use these states to create characters and performance pieces that respond to and affect the world we live in. Our investigations will focus on the meeting point of word and body, shifting between text-based and movement-based exercises to approach new modes of analysis and expression. To this end, each class will include discussion, physical warm-ups, and generative writing assignments that consider performance to be a form of research. March 2nd – April 20th
8 Sessions Thursdays 7-9pm $200 |
INSTRUCTORRachel Lyon's fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in McSweeney's, Joyland, Bustle, The Toast, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere; her debut novel is forthcoming from Scribner. Rachel attended Princeton University (BA) and Indiana University (MFA), where she was fiction editor of Indiana Review. She lives in Brooklyn, her hometown, but you can visit her online at www.rachellyon.work.
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EAVESDROPPING FOR DIALOGUEGeorge Saunders has said, “Bad dialogue is when A asks a question and B answers it.” Dialogue should be two people “firing missiles past each other.” Well-written dialogue, meanwhile, is “like poetry—it’s not functional, but it looks good on the page and has a zinginess." Even our greatest writers have a complicated relationship with dialogue. For years Zadie Smith didn't write dialogue at all, because Nabokov was against it completely.
In "Eavesdropping For Dialogue: Embracing Transgression to Listen for What Goes Unsaid" we'll analyze the power dynamics, performance, communication, confession, (dis)functionality, and "zing-iness" of organic and constructed dialogue from vastly different sources. We'll read, watch, and analyze famous dialogues. We'll eavesdrop on ourselves, our friends, and strangers. We'll read between the lines in our own written and recorded conversations. And through it all, we'll practice the craft of writing great dialogue, from "said-bookisms" to dialogue tags, direct address, and beyond. Preliminary reading / listening list:
February 15th - April 5th
8 Sessions Wednesdays 7-9pm $200 |
INSTRUCTORTom Block is an artist, writer and activist best known for the development and implementation an activist art theory, “Prophetic Activist Art.” His activist work includes founding the Institute of Prophetic Activist Art at Dixon Place (NY); the Human Rights Painting Project, in conjunction with Amnesty International; Shalom/Salaam Project, presented at conferences, universities and galleries around the United States, Canada, Europe, Turkey and the Middle East; Response to Machiavelli Project, represented by published book (Machiavelli in America), two series of paintings and two plays; Cousins Public Art Project, installed in Tempe, AZ and Silver Spring, MD. He was the founding producer of the Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival, an international event that took place April 2010 in Silver Spring, MD, and the Iraq History Art Project, DePaul University 2010. He is currently producing New York City's first ever International Human Rights Art Festival (Dixon Place, March 2017).
Mr. Block has published five books and has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums more than 200 times throughout the United States and Europe. His plays have been produced and read over the last few years in numerous venues in New York and Washington DC. For more information, please visit: www.tomblock.com |
PROPHETIC ACTIVIST ARTProphetic Activist Art: Strategies for a Spiritual Revolution is a seminar exploring how to build individual art-activist projects. Over the course of the eight weeks, classes will include an introduction to the specific aspects of the Prophetic Activist Art model (developed by Tom Block out of his own work, and published as an art/activist manifesto in 2014), and then an exploration about how these ideas can be applied to each artist and their endeavor.
The course will follow the specific model developed in the text, Prophetic Activist Art: Handbook for a Spiritual Revolution (Centre for Human Ecology, Scotland, 2014). The seminar will explore the motivations and strategies for each particular activist art project. It will then introduce artists to the specific ideas of the model, including co-opting political, business and social energy; partnering with non-profit groups; making liaisons with other artists; utilizing unusual exhibition and outreach methods; “Machiavellian” activism; how to build a project from inception through completion; how to imagine and successfully attain quantifiable activist goals and other specific aspects of a Prophetic Activist Art intervention. March 7th – May 2nd*
*No class April 11th 8 Sessions Tuesdays 7-9pm $200 |